It is easy to pigeonhole this book, to contextualize it in
a category of Holocaust literature or Jewish American fiction, or Yiddish
literature.The title of this work
almost appears to beg this contextualization, since the term “survivor” seems
to connote the photographs of hungry-looking faces looking out from behind
barbed wire.

And indeed this book of short stories does contribute to
the study of the post-Holocaust experience, and to embody different aspects of
the terrible tragedies inflicted upon the dead and the living from World War
II.Survivors also fits into the
tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and maintains the atmosphere of a
defamiliarized language, the Yiddish with which one no longer communicates with
others, but which communicates most deeply with the experience of the
past.In this it is a quintessential
Yiddish work.

But the very nature of the pieces in this book forbids
mere contextualization, and is even antithetical to the idea of
contextualization.These are the tales
of individuals endeavoring to prevail in a treacherous and changing world.Emphasizing the plurality of the identities
of survivors, each story is different, each life takes distinctive turns, and
the people who inhabit these narratives, or who relate their own narratives,
all have different lives and individual reactions to these lives.Thus the passive unhappy housewife in “A
Friday in the Life of Sarah Zonabend” is grateful that nothing happens, while
Leah in “Francois” invents a lover to help her create the inertia necessary to
change her life.Barukh, the protagonist
of “The Greenhorn,” still fresh from the DP camps, has difficulty adjusting to
the tailoring workship in which he begins his new life in Canada, and Dr.
Simon Brown,
the third-generation American psychiatrist in “Serengeti,” has no initial
connection to the Holocaust.

Nevertheless there are some characteristics that underlie
all of these people.

For all of them do not entirely belong to where they are,
andthe world outside is a strange one, despite the many
details that place the events clearly in the context of a real Montreal or a
real Paris or South America or Africa.But the real landscape is not part of the world of the survivor – who is
always remote and strange here – and takes on primarily symbolic
significances.The cross on Mont Royal, visible everywhere in the city, becomes part
of the world view of Edgia in “Edgia’s Revenge” of suffering.For her the icon of Christianity is a reminder that human relationships are
divided into the sufferer and the God who imposes this suffering.Having survived Auschwitz
because of the sudden and fleeting humanity
of the Kapo (Jewish concentration camp guard)Rella, Edgia marries a man who relegates her to a demeaning, slavish role in their relationship.And when she marries again, having been
widowed, she at first treats her second husband in the same way she herself had
been treated before.Throughout their
friendship Edgia continues to admire Rella and to model herself according to
Rella and her protective sadism. It is only when her second husband’s life is
endangered does Edgia suddenly realize that all of her relationships have been
based on her identification with her savior and her torturer, Rella.Rella had learned the value of submission in
the camps, when she was saved by her god, a German guard, and understood from
this that relationships could only be based on a master-slave model.Edgia transcends this damaging mindset at that
moment, and ‘revenges’herself by creating a satisfying life.“Edgia’s Revenge” itself illustrates the
lesson of the story, by presenting a kapo as a complex and profound
personality, wounded irrevocably by her own experience.In an interview with Ramona Koval about this
story, Rosenfarb notes: “I think that kapos were hated by everybody. I watched,
after the liberation, kapos being killed by inmates, by ex-inmates after
liberation. I understand that. Kapos caused death. They brought people to
destruction, to be killed, to be annihilated, and the kapos were hated. There
is already a certain level of humanness in forgiving the kapos because the
kapos were the instruments of the Germans… Kapos had it so much better in the
camp – they had food, they had clothing, they had a good life, relatively. So
it was good to be a kapo, and you had power, power is a wonderful thing. You
had power over others.” (”Books and Writing on Radio National, Radio Australia and
the Web.” http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1102117.htm) The
awareness of the ambiguity of morality, the complexity of the choices made in
the Holocaust, and the insistence on some moral framework despite the
questionable nature of morality in the universe is part of what emerges in Survivors.

In many ways “Edgia’s Revenge” specifically and Survivors
in general emerge as works concerned not only with the survivors, but the lives
created after survival, as well as the inheritance of these lessons to the next
generation.Rella’s lack of realization
of the significance of Edgia’s freedom from the imperatives of the
concentration-camp mentality makes salient the extent to which the legacy of
the Holocaust can continue to damage the individuals.In “Little Red Bird,”Manya’s husband dies while she is distracted
and deaf to his calls for help, drawn into memories and fantasies of her lost
daughter.This is made even more clear
in “Last Love,” in which the survivor whose dying wish is fulfilled, to sleep
with a young man, continues to haunt the young man to the point of his
destruction.

The stories may be read as single works and as stages in a
spiritual development.With the
arrangement of the stories the definition of ‘survivor’ alters and expands in
the course of the book.The first story,
“The Greenhorn,” portrays a typical refugee after the war who cannot overcome
his past experiences, but in each subsequent portrayal, the concept of survival
expands.“Francois,” the penultimate
tale, deals with the transcendence of the need for fantasy when the present
reality is altered.In the final
story,“Serengeti,” set in the endangered environment of a preserve in Africa, survival is linked to environment, the world of
jungle animals to the scarred
survivor of the Holocaust whose intelligence and flexibility were aided by
chance.

Yet as the concept of ‘survivor’ expands, and the periods
in which the stories are placed seem more and more contemporary, theidea of memory remains.Do not try to survive by forgetting, the book
teaches, but by absorbing each successive lesson.Marisha, the survivor in the final story,
criticizes the morality of psychiatry: “This is because…psychiatry puts a
negative emphasis on the individual’s sense of guilt, disregarding guilt’s
positive role as a potential corrective to behavior.” (262-3)The lesson is in part a response to American
Jewish literature,
and the psychiatrist protagonist incorporates it, “He belonged to the sun, the
queen of life and death.That was enough
for him. Dayenu…that was plenty.”
This is not survival, it is acceptance and transcendence.

Chava
Rosenfarb who has been writing since she was eight years old in Lodz
Poland,is one of the most prominent
living Yiddish writers, and has received numerous prizes for her work,
including the 1988 and 1993 Prize of the Congress for Jewish Culture (New
York), and the Sholem Aleichem Prize (Tel-Aviv). Her novel, Der Boym fun
lieb (The Tree of Life) won the 1979 Itsik Manger Prize. Suvivors hasbeen awarded the 2005 Canadian
Jewish Book Award and was nominated for the Howard O'Hagan Award for
Short Fiction of the Alberta Book
Awards.

The translation is also not without its awards.Nominee for the ALTA National Translation
Award 2005,winner of the2006Modern Language Association of America Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial
Prize in Yiddish Studies this translation is transparent.Goldie Morganthaler deserves special
commendation for a seamless English that nevertheless maintains the sense of
the experiential strangeness of life in another language.Thus while at least some of the depth and
isolation of existence comes from the perspective of contemplation in Yiddish,
and this perspective adds greatly to the atmosphere of the stories, the
translation level maintains the original dignity as well.